Andrea Yates Church

Andrea Yates Church, Doctors treating Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children in a bathtub in 2001, will ask that she be allowed to leave her mental hospital for two hours each week to attend church, her attorney said Thursday.

“It is a recommendation of the doctors that she be permitted to attend, and of course she wants to,” attorney George Parnham said. “It would be both beneficial and mentally therapeutic for her. She has been accepted into a congregation. It is simply a baby step in the right direction toward acclimation into a community down the road of sorts.”

Yates’ doctors at Kerrville State Hospital, in Kerrville, Texas, will make the request of the trial judge “in the next week or two,” Parnham said.

“I am all for it, but of course it is the judge’s decision and we all recognize it,” he said.

Now 47, Yates “has not been seen or been a part of any portion of society for the last 11 years,” Parnham said Thursday.

During her first trial in 2002, jurors heard taped interviews in which Yates said that she thought Satan was sending her messages and that she was sending her children — Noah, 7; John, 5; Paul, 3; Luke, 2; and Mary, 6 months — to heaven and sparing them from hell when she killed them on June 20, 2001.

Several medical experts testified that she suffered from schizophrenia, depression and other medical conditions. Parnham argued Yates was suffering from a “full-blown psychosis.”